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Jump to navigationJump to searchI & I: The Natural Mystics by Colin Grant (view source)
Revision as of 13:50, 14 January 2012
, 13:50, 14 January 2012no edit summary
As is so often the way, the group members reacted very differently to success, with Marley the most eager to embrace stardom and all that went with it. He was the front man and focus of the act, while the others, always more militant at heart and loath to see their music watered down as they saw it in the interests of mass acceptance, soon became resentful and they gradually drifted apart. Maybe it was as well for their reputation that Marley, who left his native land after being shot and wounded in 1976 in a political campaign, was not long for this world; he contracted cancer and died in 1981. Tosh was murdered six years later by thieves who broke into his home demanding money, leaving Wailer as the only survivor and standard bearer to carry their music forward into a new age.
The book gives an atmospheric picture of the life in their native land which they left behind for a while, to come and tour England in the spring of 1973. We have a vivid portrait of a country which was ""''cold and unforgiving""'', or ""''a locked-up nation, a grey fortress of stone""''. The author might have added that life in the cold country was however undoubtedly a good deal safer than it was at home. I felt that more could have been said on the period when they broke through to mass British acceptance in the summer of 1975, when critics were falling over themselves to praise the group. But by the time we reach this stage, the narrative seems to become somewhat rushed. In particular there is hardly any analysis of or attention to the individual songs. No Woman No Cry, a live recording of which was released as a single and really stands out as one of the most important tracks of the decade, gets barely a passing mention, while there is some discussion about I Shot The Sheriff as a lyric about birth control, but no mention of the fact that Eric Clapton’s successful recording of same in 1974 (No. 1 in America and top ten across much of Europe) probably did more to spread the word about Marley and boost his royalties than all the group’s live work in England the previous year had ever managed to do.
Nevertheless the author deals perceptively with what might be called the era of decline and fall - Marley’s unexpected illness and death, Tosh’s brief success as a solo artist on the Rolling Stones’ record label amid accusations of selling-out by having a hit with an old Motown song by the Temptations song and his violent death in 1987, and finally (or in this case, the episode which actually starts the book), then Bunny Wailer’s appearance on stage at a 1990 concert in Kingston at which he was jeered and bottled off stage by the crowd. As Grant comments, it gave reggae music a spectacular fall and astonishingly brutal postscript.
