Today (24 Aug) marks the release of the 40th anniversary edition of Kaya by Bob Marley & The Wailers. It's a 2CD /LP reissue, where the additional side features Stephen Marley remixes of each track. Stephen’s approach was to keep to the feel of the original and mimic the analog concepts of the 70s, and it's been warmly received by critics thus far.
But what of the original? Gigwise have asked Chris Salewicz, writer of the biography Bob Marley: The Untold Story, to fill us in on what was happening in Marley’s life at the time. The resulting chapter allows a closer understanding of the man behind some of the greatest songs ever written, and, for us, this helps the songs stand out in more poignant ways ever before. Read the remarkable exclusive excerpt below. Treasure the classic Kaya......
--
On December 3 1976 Bob Marley had escaped an attempt on his life when gunmen had broken into his Kingston yard at 56 Hope Road. Going into exile in London in the new year, moving into a rented Chelsea house, he immediately started recording at Island Studios.
By the end of March 1977 all the songs for what would become the Exodus album had been recorded. But the group worked on in the studio, completing a total of twenty-four tunes. Quickly these were weighed up: the tone of ten of them was perfect for Exodus, whose first side was given over to five songs about the shooting: Natural Mystic, So Much Things to Say, Guiltiness, The Heathen (with its lines: he who live to fight and run away/live to fight another day), the first side concluding with the title-track, its lyrics a metaphor for Bob Marley’s own flight from Jamaica. In the year 2000 this material, which had been released in a distinctive all-gold sleeve, the colour of the earth’s life-force, would be voted Album of the Century by TIME magazine.
The remaining songs, lighter and more mystical in vein, were put aside for the next album, Kaya; Kaya was mixed at Criteria Sound in Miami, a conscious and successful effort to give the record a different feel and sound. Essentially the relaxed, laid back Kaya was a collection of love songs and, of course, homages to the power of ganja; the album would provide a pair of chart singles, Satisfy My Soul and the beautiful Is This Love?
Kaya, the title-track, and Sun Is Shining, first had appeared on the Soul Revolution album released by the original Wailers trio in 1971, produced by Lee Perry. Sun Is Shining had been written in 1967 in the Jamaican bush when Bob had returned to live for a time in Nine Miles, the St Ann hamlet of his birth in north-central Jamaica. Exodus was still high in the UK chart when Kaya was released on March 23 1978. And a month later, on 21 April 1978, Bob Marley was instrumental in bringing about the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, an endeavour to bring about a truce between Jamaica’s murderous political factions. Planeloads of assorted members of the media descended upon the island, to the delight of every pickpocket and gunman in the capital. Seizing the moment with unerring pragmatism, Island Records cleverly managed to spin this historic event into being simultaneously both a great humanitarian act and a kind of enormous ghetto launch-party for the release of Kaya, Bob Marley’s new album. In effect, the One Love Peace Concert was the first date of the Kaya world tour. As a reward for being the inspirational figurehead of the One Love Peace Concert, on June 15 Bob Marley was presented with the Peace Medal of the Third World at the UN General Assembly at the UN General Assembly in New York City.
In a promotional interview for Kaya in California, Bob Marley bared his thoughts. ‘People don’t understand that we live on this earth too,’ said Bob of the album. ‘We don’t sing these songs and live in the sky. I don’t have an army behind me. If I did, I wouldn’t care, I’d just get more militant. Because I’d know, well, I have fifty thousand armed youth, and when I talk, I talk from strength. But you have to know how you’re dealing. Maybe if I’d tried to make a heavier tune than Kaya they would have tried to assassinate me because I would have come too hard. I have to know how to run my life, because that’s what I have, and nobody can tell me to put it on the line, you dig? Because no one understands these things. These things are heavier than anyone can understand. People that aren’t involved don’t know it, it’s my work, and I know it inside in. I know when I am in danger and what to do to get out. I know when everything is cool, and I know when I tremble, do you understand? Because music is something that everyone follows, so it’s a force, a terrible force.’
The paradox was that whilst promoting Kaya, this allegedly non-confrontational record, Bob Marley was becoming more and more immersed in radical American black politics. In Chicago he visited a number of black bookshops. A large quantity of black-consciousness books was purchased, including various biographies of Malcolm X, as well as work by Angela Davis, famously radical, a friend and professor of Neville Garrick, Bob Marley’s art director. For the rest of the tour Garrick would see Bob devouring these volumes at every opportunity: ‘You can see how his lyrics matured in terms of clarity over the next records. From Natty Dread to Survival is a big leap.’
At the end of North American and European dates, Bob Marley returned to Jamaica. But only briefly: before embarking on the ensuing Japanese and Australasian dates, he caught a plane to somewhere he had been waiting for many years to visit: Ethiopia. A profound change was taking place within Bob Marley.
--
