of the downtrodden to overcome the mighty–an inspirational bit of symbolism for the thralldom in slavery days.
Like the blueswee spider man, reggae, as played by Bob Marley and the Wailers, is both a wellspring of homespun adages and a canny cultural tool with great facility for adaptation and innovation. Tracing the Wailers' growth from the falsetto vocals and languid R&B/jazz-tinged shuffle of their seminal ska era in the early Sixties, on through the percolating soul of rock steady, the raw, late-Sixties stutter beat of reggae, to the rise of the dub-wise march cadences (dubs are sledgehammer rhythm tracks) popularly referred to as rockers and militant, the band's evolution is so dramatic that one realizes the music has never lingered in any stylistic camp for more than two years. In fact, the Wailers are the only group to have thrived during these many phases, producing reggae as desperate as the souls who fill Jamaica's troubled hills, savannas and ghetto streets. Still, it's surprising to find Marley, on the live Babylon by Bus, turning a new musical corner with an altogether buoyant sound that's religious in its life-affirming Rastafarian underpinnings and universal in its romantic longing.
For a multitude of Jamaicans, Bob Marley is Anancy incarnate, a sagacious shantytown hero whose concerts evince the fearsome ballet of a black widow spider and boast a musical artifice shrewd enough to sidestep Brer Death himself. Indeed, Marley narrowly escaped assassination in December 1976 while rehearsing for an outdoor Smile Jamaica festival in Kingston. But he went on as scheduled, opening the tense, nighttime program with "War," a 1968 speech by the late Haile Selassie that the singer had set to a loping tempo. At evening's end, Marley opened his shirt to show his bullet wounds and then parroted the two-pistoled fast draw of a frontier gunslinger, his dread-locked head thrown back in triumphant laughter.
That was a mythic Marley performance, the spindly singer/songwriter embodying the defiant rudeboys, righteous Rastamen and duppy (evil spirit) conquerors with which he peoples his most ominous compositions. As in the Smile Jamaica show, the highly charged rendition of "War" on Babylon by Bus (now paired with t
ecorded on the road in Europe during a 1978 tour, this is one of the Wailers' definitive live releases. Marley may be associated with ganja and tripped-out hippies in the U.S., but a certain ferocity lies under songs like "Exodus" and "War/No More Trouble," reminding us how political Marley's message actually was. Ashton "Familyman" Barrett is on bass.
