An album of revolutionary genius, which mixed excellent timing with lasting cultural significance, Catch A Fireplace laid a basis stone for the profession of the world’s first and certainly solely reggae celebrity and established a bridgehead between the deep roots music of Jamaica and the business pop mainstream of the First World. Its launch marked the second that reggae really did start to “catch fire” on the worldwide stage.
Though Catch A Fireplace launched Bob Marley to the world past his Caribbean homeland, it was not the singer’s first album. Certainly, it wasn’t even a Bob Marley album. Catch A Fireplace was the fifth album by the group recognized and billed merely because the Wailers who had been enjoying and recording collectively in Jamaica for a decade or extra earlier than it was launched.
It’s tough to convey how little was recognized about Jamaican music in pre-Marley Britain and America initially of the Nineteen Seventies. Regardless of the wealthy and various historical past of reggae and its antecedents of ska, bluebeat, and mento, solely a smattering of reggae songs had ever made an impression on the charts exterior the island. Within the UK, reggae had unlucky associations with the skinhead boot-boy tendency and Max Romeo’s lubricious (and banned) Prime 10 hit “Wet Dream.” Within the US, occasional pop hits by American acts similar to Neil Diamond (“Red Red Wine”) and Johnny Nash (“Hold Me Tight”) skimmed sweetly throughout the floor of the reggae/rocksteady custom.
However this was about to alter. The Tougher They Come, a film starring the Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff, with a soundtrack of reggae songs carried out by Cliff, Desmond Dekker, and others, premiered on the Venice Movie Competition in 1972 and have become a slow-burning worldwide success. Later the identical yr, Nash scored a Prime 15 hit in each the UK and the US together with his recording of Bob Marley’s track “Stir It Up.” The American star introduced the Wailers over as a assist act on his 1972 tour of the UK, the place the band met up with Chris Blackwell who signed them to document an album for Island Information.
The Wailers recorded Catch A Fireplace in three completely different eight-track studios in Kingston. In distinction to earlier recordings, they now had a finances that might do full justice to the songs, seven of which have been written by Marley – who additionally produced the album – and two by the group’s different singer and lead guitarist Peter Tosh. Even so, when Marley returned to London to ship the grasp tapes, Blackwell insisted that extra work was wanted and promptly took over the manufacturing reins. Including overdubbed contributions from the session guitarist Wayne Perkins, Blackwell tweaked preparations and adjusted mixes, rolling again a number of the heavier bass-end elements and usually molding the sound right into a form that remained true to the band’s roots, however which might additionally sit comfortably within the mainstream rock market of the day.
The end result was an album with a groove that was languid, soulful, and sun-drenched, but lean and taut as a coiled spring. The bass and drum elements – provided by Aston “Family Man” Barrett and his youthful brother Carlton Barrett, respectively – have been welded collectively by the distinctive staccato scratch-strokes of Marley’s rhythm guitar. The irresistible rhythmic tug which this produced was a revelation to the nice majority of listeners discovering the band for the primary time. So too have been the extremely intricate vocal elements. It’s usually forgotten that the Wailers had begun life as a vocal group and now, aided by Rita Marley (Bob’s spouse) and Marcia Griffiths, the band, together with percussionist Bunny Wailer, wove a wealthy patchwork of concord and counterpoint vocal elements round Marley’s and Tosh’s melody strains on numbers similar to “Stop That Train” and “Baby We’ve Got A Date (Rock It Baby).” The keyboard elements, provided by John Rabbit Bundrick, accomplished the sonic image with organ, clavinet, and a sprinkling of recent digital results.
It was an album of two sides; actually, in these days when vinyl was the one commercially viable format, but in addition in its lyrical preoccupations, which have been evenly divided between a cry of anguish from the ghetto and the cry of a younger man in pursuit of one thing else. The album’s most enduring track, “Stir It Up” – already successful for Johnny Nash – was adopted by the much more explicitly amorous “Kinky Reggae,” by which a sure Miss Brown was mentioned to have “brown sugar all over ’er booga-wooga.”
However the emotional meat of the album was within the passionate, street-poet lyrics of protest songs together with “Slave Driver” and “400 Years.” “No chains around my feet/But I’m not free/I know I’m bounded in captivity,” Marley sang in “Concrete Jungle,” the primary of a number of searing cries on behalf of the oppressed and dispossessed of his homeland which echoed what was generally known as the “negro spiritual” music of earlier generations.
The quilt of the Wailers’ first album The Wailing Wailers, launched in 1965, carried an image of the three principals – Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley, and Peter Tosh – neatly groomed in tuxedos and bow ties above the strap-line “Jamaica’s Top Rated Singing Sensations.” Issues had modified considerably by the point the group made their first UK TV look on the Outdated Gray Whistle Check on Might 1, 1973. Marley in a blue work-shirt, eyes screwed shut, regarded like a younger messiah. He was flanked by Wailer on percussion and Tosh in a rasta-colored beanie hat and rock-dignitary shades enjoying lead guitar with an excessive wah-wah impact. Alongside keyboard participant Earl Lindo, the heavy-duty rhythm part of Barrett and Barrett locked on to the unusually loping groove in a means that had no precedent in UK music. Their efficiency on the present of “Concrete Jungle” and “Stir It Up” opened the door to a brand new musical world for an viewers accustomed to a food plan of Jackson Browne, Focus, and Manfred Mann’s Earthband. With publicity for widespread music of any variety nonetheless a uncommon prevalence, it turned a kind of pivotal TV moments, moderately like the primary look of David Bowie singing “Starman” on Prime Of The Pops the yr earlier than.
The unique provenance of Catch A Fireplace contributed to the indelible impression it had on anybody and everybody who was paying consideration. However by the identical token, the battle for mass-market acceptance was to not be gained in a single day. Extremely looking back, the album made no impression on the UK chart and solely reached No.171 within the US.
A extra acceptable indicator is that Catch A Fireplace now stands because the highest-placed reggae album in Rolling Stone’s 2003 record of The five hundred Best Albums Of All Time (at No.126; it was outranked solely by Marley’s posthumous compilation Legend at No.46). However regardless of the statistical knowledge might or might not counsel, it’s tough to overstate the historic significance and groundbreaking brilliance of Marley’s first worldwide album launch.
Catch A Fireplace could be purchased right here.
