DVD Review: Classic Albums Series - Bob Marley And The Wailers - Catch A Fire

Catch A Fire is nowhere near being my favorite Bob Marley album. Not even close. I'm much more partial to his latter work, like Kaya and especially the great Exodus. But Catch A Fire was the album designed by Chris Blackwell and Island Records to break both Marley and reggae music in general here in the United States (there was already a strong buzz in England).

What I will tell you is this. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have seen Bob Marley and the Wailers in concert twice before his untimely death in 1981. And let me tell you, at the time, there was nothing quite like it. The crowd Marley drew back then was an odd mix to be sure. In fact, the closest thing I could compare it to would be a Grateful Dead concert. Lots of hippies. Lots of pot smoke in the air. And at one of the two shows I saw, several hippie chicks doing that fertility sort of dance that they do topless up and down the aisles.

But what I most remember from those Marley concerts I saw back in the seventies was the unbelievably hypnotic groove these guys would lock themselves into. The effect was nothing short of trancelike. And politically charged lyrics aside, that groove just took you away to a completely different place.

While this DVD largely focuses on the making of Catch A Fire, what really makes it worth the price of admission is the rare concert footage that shows up near the end. Shot during Marley's 1973 tour in Edmonton, London, the two-song sequence shown here is in the sort of very grainy black and white you'd mostly expect from something unearthed from the vaults that long ago.

But the hypnotic groove these guys lock into took me right back to when I saw Marley at Seattle's Paramount Theatre in the seventies. The two songs played, "Slave Driver" (from Catch A Fire) and "Get Up Stand Up" (the Marley classic from it's followup Burnin), show just why these guys from Jamaica caught the ears of so many British rock musicians at the time. Like I said, the groove is one you could get easily lost in.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics assistant music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blogs The World Wide Glen, and The Rockologist. In a previous life, Glen was a music professional and journalist whose work has appeared in The Rocket, SPIN, Pulse!, and The Source. …

Visit Glen Boyd's author page — Glen Boyd's Blog