Early on in their relationship, someone asked Bob Marley if Island Records owner Chris Blackwell was his producer. Bob said "No Mon, he's my translator". While that was a good joke, because of Bob's heavy accent, Bob might have been more accurate is saying that Chris was his interpreter for the work he did on the early Wailers albums.
Eagle Rock Entertainment has released Bob Marley And The Wailers: Catch A Fire as part of their new DVD series Classic Albums. The purpose of the series is to take a closer look at how some of the seminal works in pop music came into being. In the case of the Wailers' Catch A Fire, it was the first attempt by any reggae group to seriously crack the British and American mainstream album markets.
Until Catch A Fire, the only reggae music that had done anything on the charts in England had been silly novelty songs or the occasional mainstream musician utilizing some of the unique rhythms in their own material. But a full-length album of serious reggae music had yet to meet with any success at all.
The DVD takes us back to 1972 when the core of the Wailers was still Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and Bob Marley. They had traveled over to London, England in an attempt to try and score a record deal or at least get someone outside the Jamaican community to pay attention to them. Considering how renowned all of these men — especially Bob and Peter Tosh — have become since then, it was surprising to hear of the antipathy that most of the popular music world felt toward reggae music at the time.
The producers of the disc have put together interviews with many different people to get their perspectives on the disc. The session men hired by Blackwell to do overdubs on the album, the original studio musicians in Jamaica who recorded the original eight tracks that Island Records worked with to make the final cut, and various other figures in the lives of the three principles of the Wailers at the time.
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting from this behind the scenes look at the creation of an album, but I don't think I expected it to be this interesting and informative. One of the main things it did for me personally is it revised my opinion of Chris Blackwell of Island Records quite substantially. Listening to him talk about what he was trying to do for the music and Bob, I was impressed with his humility and the commitment he was willing to show an unknown band performing music that had no history of sales - either in mainstream America or Britain.
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