Bunny had heard talk of a man named Blackwell who distributed some of their records in the U.K. [Studio One Record Producer] Coxsone Dodd had mentioned to him that this Blackwell man had released their pre-reggae hits “Simmer Down” and “It Hurts to Be Alone” in the sixties.
Yet here they were in my office one day in 1972, acting on Bunny’s belief that I owed them, waiting to see what I could offer them. They showed up unannounced, plonking themselves down in my modest accommodations on the second floor at Basing Street, where there was a couch for people to sit on and a record player for me to listen to music.characters. They did not walk in like losers, like they were defeated by being flat broke. To the contrary, they exuded power and self-possession.
I told them they needed to come over like a Black rock act. There were no precedents for this kind of thing in Jamaica, and barely anywhere else, except maybe in the US, which had Sly and the Family Stone. Being a “rock act,” I told them, did not have to mean selling out or surrendering their identity. Pete and Bunny were skeptical, but Bob was immediately intrigued. Black Jamaican music was always evolving, from ska to rocksteady to reggae, and reggae was poised to evolve further.
I was chuffed. I went back to my hotel. Later on, the Wailers collected me there and took me to their studio, Harry J’s. What they played me was what becametheir first Island album. It sounded great and they sounded like a group — it was a tremendous progression from other Jamaican music. The biggest change I made to their original sound was symbolized by the guitar on “Concrete Jungle,” which was one of the most complex reggae songs I had ever heard, the perfect statement to begin the album. If you wanted to know where they came from, this immediately told you. They sang about their own history, about themselves, and, as Bob said, about things they didn’t teach you in school.
When the track began, you could tell he didn’t know where he was in the music. He was lost. He said it sounded to him like the music was playing backwards — it seemed simple and spare but had so much nuance and complexity, so much dynamism in what seemed to be empty space. He was distracted by the bass, which sounded like it was playing lead. I told him to ignore it. To help, I got the engineer to turn it down.
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