In 1978, after a career spanning 15 years and six albums with the Wailers under Island, Bob Marley had become a worldwide icon. He had just released his most popular album, Exodus, and was flooding the airwaves with the tracks Waiting in Vain, Jamming and Three Little Birds, as well as other future classics. However, he was unsatisfied with the image he presented to the public. Associated with the hippy movement and idolised by the white western youth, Marley was upset by criticism of his album Kaya, recorded, like Exodus, during his exile in London where he mingled with local white rebels, the punks. Released in March ’78, the album is considered his lightest, for its title (kaya is another word for ganja) and soft songs like Is This Love and Satisfy My Soul.
Bob Marley’s character was nevertheless eminently political. In 1976, on Rastaman Vibration, he sang War (inspired by a well-known speech from Ethiopian head of state, and living god for rastas, Haïlé Sélassié, given to the UN on the 4th of October 1963 calling for the respect of human rights “regardless of race”) which became an antimilitarist hymn. But Bob Marley was not a pacifist, he was a militant, a revolutionary, and he intended to make this known in his following albums in the form of a political trilogy of which he already had the names in mind: Survival, Uprising and Confrontation.
After the One Love Peace Concert on the 22nd of April ’78, during which he (temporarily) reconciled with two foes on the Jamaican political scene, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, Marley shifted towards a more globalised militarism in favour of Africa and conceptualised his next album Survival, which he recorded in January and February of 1979 in Kingston. The album’s release was set for autumn, but Marley teased his new project during several spring and summertime concerts, notably the Amandla Festival of Unity in Boston, 21st of July 1979, organised in support of the liberation of South America in which he addressed the crowd criticising the colonialist system and calling for unity in the black continent.
In October, the world was introduced to the unique and symbolic sleeve for Survival which featured 48 flags of which 47 were African and the other that of Papua New Guinea. The sleeve did not feature the flag of South Africa which was then still under apartheid rule. The record - which was almost called Black Survival - opens with the powerful So Much Trouble in the World, before unleashing a string of militant titles on Pan-Africanism and independence, like Zimbabwe, Africa Unite, Wake Up and Live and Survival.
The song Zimbabwe, widely distributed among black guerrillas in Southern Rhodesia (the country’s former name), won him an invitation from Robert Mugabe, then still considered a hero, to celebrate independence in April 1980. Bob Marley spent 250,000 dollars of his own money on sending material to Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, for a historical concert. From the concert, he brought back a flag which he flew above the entrance to his house in Kingston along with a new international aura.
But earlier that year, Bob Marley had already pondered his next move. During the first three months of 1980, just before departing for Zimbabwe, recording for Uprising was underway in his Kingston studio. It was a committed and enraged piece of work against “all the oppressors around the world who tyrannise people without justification”, as explained by the Jamaican at the time according to Francis Dordor of Inrocks.
But Uprising also held another objective: to rally black American audiences as reggae was primarily an affair for young white hippies in the United States. It was with this in mind that Bob sought the advice of Frankie “Hollywood” Crocker, DJ for Studio 54 and program director of New York black music radio WBLS, who broke Blondie, Madonna and Arthur Baker and who regularly playlisted the Wailers. “You need a song that mixes reggae with a kind of James Brown funk”, explained Crocker.
An idea would come to Junior Marvin, guitarist for the Wailers since 1977 and Exodus, who, to give you a brief history, had turned down Stevie Wonder to work with Marley, a fellow Jamaican. It was he who, during a rehearsal in London, conceived the riff for Could You Be Loved which immediately caught earshot of Bob: “What’s that thing you’re playing?” “I dunno just a thing I’m playing around with.” “Can I have it?” “Yeah sure!”. The following day, Marley came back with the chorus for Could You Be Loved.
The first draft was approved by Frankie Crocker and composition was finished in Chris Blackwell’s private jet who flew Bob Marley, another Jamaican idol Jacob Miller, and Junior Marvin to a promotional event in Brazil. The song was recorded immediately after during a problematic session described by the guitarist of the Red Bull Music Academy: “We got back to Brazil with Bob, Jacob Miller, drummer Earl Lindo, a keyboardist and myself. We recorded the first version to which Jacob Miller added drums and it turned out amazingly. Everyone chipped in with certain details until we had the perfect version. But the sound engineer, I won’t reveal his name, accidentally deleted everything when we got around to synchronisation. We never got that vibe back, but we still managed to get quite close.”
Released as a single, the song entered the top 10 of dozens of countries and enabled the Wailers to join the elite of American black music, in the same way as Pimper’s Paradise. They shared a stage at Madison Square Garden with The Commodores in September 1980 and a tour with Stevie Wonder was planned. But Uprising was not merely a dance record; it begins as an attack against the system (Coming in From the Cold) then politicians (Bad Card). Bob Marley saves until the end of the record his most militant song, Redemption Song, recorded alone with his acoustic guitar. The song is truly symbolic with lyrics that would resonate across several generations of rebels on all levels (“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds”).
On the 10th of June, 1980, immediately after the release of Uprising, Bob embarked on a triumphant European tour. 120,000 people in Milan, 10,000 for each date of his French tour, and ended with a legendary set in front of 50,000 at the Bourget on the 3rd of July, 1980, inspiring this quip from Coluche: “The Pope in Bourget: 22,000 people for free! Bob Marley: 47,000 paid! I wonder if reggae is on its way to becoming a religion.”
On his return to the United States at the end of summer, Bob Marley delivered two concerts in New York before collapsing during a jog in Central Park. Through his pain, he performed a final concert in Pittsburgh two days later, the 23rd of September, before doctors told him that the cancer had spread to his brain.
Bob passed away on the 11th of May, 1981, at the Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Miami leaving the final part of his trilogy, the album Confrontation, of which he had already approved the title, incomplete. Finalised by Rita Marley and Chris Blackwell from studio remnants, and released in 1983, the album notably contains I Know (recorded in ’75 at the time of Rastaman Vibration), Rastaman Live Up and Blackman Redemption (found in the January ’79 Survival sessions), and Give Thanks and Praises (which was excluded from the final version of Uprising). It’s known that Bob Marley would sometimes work for years on a track before he found the correct arrangement, and Confrontation is logically far from reaching the heights of its predecessors. Nevertheless, in addition to Stiff Necked Fools, in which Marley criticises a stuck-up bourgeoisie, it includes the hit Buffalo Soldier, which passed onto future generations thanks to the compilation album Legend. The track, the final indicator of the militant stance Marley adopted on this series of albums, alludes to regiments of black soldiers in the US Army at the end of the 19th century, which to him represented a model for resistance to racism, by drawing a parallel with slavery (“Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival”).
For Junior Marvis, in Buffalo Soldier, Marley was referring to his own life: “Bob lived a very difficult life. His father died when he was young; he and his mother slept rough, on the ground, it was real misery. Most people would give up in these conditions. But he stayed positive and was never bitter towards anyone at all. He was a true Buffalo Soldier.”
