Bob Marley & The Wailers – ‘Catch a Fire’
It was impossible to ignore: Bob Marley was turning into a superstar. A full decade after first learning how to play guitar and harmonise with his friends, Marley was still doing that with two of his closest mates, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Around them, the trio had assembled a group consisting of the best reggae musicians in Jamaica, rooted in the rock-solid sibling rhythm section of bassist Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett and drummer Carlton Barrett. The band’s group of backing vocalists, which included Marley’s wife, Rita, added to the family atmosphere.
Still, Marley was trying to break away. After an excursion to Sweden with fellow reggae singer Johnny Nash, Marley made a brief attempt at kickstarting his solo career by releasing the single ‘Reggae on Broadway’ and touring the UK. Limited success forced Marley to return to The Wailers, who then staged a few triumphant British shows of their own. Without any money to fly back home, Marley made a direct appeal to Chris Blackwell, head of Island Records. Blackwell sent them enough money to get back home, and The Wailers would later repay him by jumping ship from CBS Records and releasing their next album, Catch a Fire, on Island (after a protracted legal battle).
After a short bit of tuning, ‘Concrete Jungle’ kicks into a funky shuffle complete with a honking clavinet line and pleading backing vocals from Bunny. The song’s bluesy solo came from an outside source: American guitarist Wayne Perkins. When Blackwell remixed the album’s songs, he invited Perkins (without the band’s knowledge) to overdub solos on three songs. While his additions are slick and memorable – especially the wah-wah fills of ‘Stir It Up’ – Perkins’ guitar parts stand out like a sore thumb on the album, breaking up the unity that was essential to The Wailers’ sound.
Both ‘Concrete Jungle’ and ‘Slave Driver’ comment on the urban hell that Marley had observed. The former leans harder into the destitute sprawl with lyrics such as “No chains around my feet but I’m not free/ I know I am bound here in captivity”, while the latter relates the modern poverty and lack of upward economic movement for black people to the days of slavery and forced relocation. While lots of fans would interpret the title to Catch a Fire as having to do with lighting up a joint, a factor no doubt helped by the iconic Zippo lighter artwork, in ‘Slave Driver’, the phrase more closely translates to “go to hell”.
If Marley was working at a feverish and socially conscious clip, Peter Tosh was doubling down on those sentiments. ‘Four Hundred Years’ blends politics with religion as Tosh kicks back at colonialism and repression. Keying into the folk tradition, Tosh calls for his peers to “Come with me, you black and you brown / You got to be free / Stop sittin’ down on your pride”.
While ‘Four Hundred Years’ is more inciting, ‘Stop That Train’ is filled with palpable exhaustion. The song is a more universal call for personal liberation as well as social and economic freedom, backed with perhaps the lightest backing beat on the entire record. Tosh doesn’t shy away from the bigger issues, with words like “Some living big, but the most is living small / They can’t even find no food at all”, but ‘Stop That Train’ finds Tosh looking inward as well. It was the kind of track that even non-reggae fans could love and try to sing. In fact, Jerry Garcia frequently included it in sets with his side project, the Jerry Garcia Band.
Side one of Catch a Fire closes out with ‘Baby We’ve Got a Date (Rock It Baby)’, one of the more carefree songs on the album. Coming complete with a pedal steel slide guitar that gives the song a distinctively tropical feel, ‘Baby We’ve Got a Date’ is a welcome respite from the heaviness of tracks like ‘Slave Driver’ and ‘Four Hundred Years’. The incendiary politics of The Wailers was always an essential part of their music, but Marley’s ability to tap into simpler and more all-encompassing themes would help make him a much bigger figure around the world.
No track on the album embodies that notion better than ‘Stir It Up’. With just three chords, Marley and the Wailers unfurl what remains perhaps the best love song that the band ever made. Family Man’s bassline jumps to the forefront of the track, as does John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick’s envelope-filtered synthesiser – unlike Perkins, Bundrick was a direct addition courtesy of Marley and recorded on the album’s basic tracks in Jamaica. Perkins’ wah-wah guitar closes out the track, but Marley still manages to charm his way into being the song’s most memorable musician. A song like ‘Stir It Up’ began The Wailers’ process of transcending reggae, and it was a simple love song that could appeal to fans of multiple genres, including rock, R&B, and pop.
The Wailers lean back into their roots with ‘Kinky Reggae’, with Carlton Barrett dropping his tumbling rhythms to propel some seriously lascivious lyrics from Marley. Barrett’s drumming style, now popularly known as the “one drop”, can easily be underrated thanks to its ubiquity across the genre of reggae. But it’s important to recognise that Barrett popularised (and possibly invented) the iconic beat that has become essential to an entire genre of music. Even the most talented Western drummers have difficulty replicating it. The “one drop” had one undisputed master, and it was Carlton Barrett.
Just like ‘Concrete Jungle’, ‘No More Trouble’ shows that The Wailers were more than just a reggae band. Emphasising the one instead of avoiding it, the band leans hard into the funk groove at the heart of the track. Marley gets a bit too lost in the early 1970s sentiments (“make love not war”), but what ‘No More Trouble’ lacks in variety it more than makes up for in groove. Even though the rhythm sections’ repeated parts are almost militaristic, the Barretts infuse a striking looseness into their rhythms and lines.
Almost every song on Catch a Fire features call-and-response vocals from Wailer and Tosh. The Wailers were still a band, with Marley’s bandmates making edits to lyrics, rhythms, arrangements, and recording. In spite of that, Catch a Fire also represents Marley’s increasing desire to become autonomous. Marley is the sole member of the group to be listed as a producer, and he was responsible for all the songwriting on all but two of the album’s tracks (Tosh’s ‘Four Hundred Years’ and ‘Stop That Train’). The music on Catch a Fire would be incredibly different had Wailer and Tosh not been involved, but Marley’s identity was becoming the focal point of the group.
The push and pull of ‘Midnight Ravers’ – another song where Wailer and Tosh work in conversation with Marley’s lead vocal – close out the original album, but other songs help illuminate The Wailers’ creative process at the time. The gentle balladry of ‘High Tide or Low Tide’ threatens to take the album in an adult contemporary/soft rock direction. An entire generation of yacht rockers would pick up the nautical idealism of songs like ‘High Tide or Low Tide’ and make them their own, but it all had to come from somewhere. Meanwhile, ‘All Day All Night’ is another darkly funky tune that probably would have been redundant next to ‘Concrete Jungle’ and ‘Midnight Ravers’.
Even during the session for Catch a Fire, tensions in The Wailers were beginning to mount. Marley’s initial attempt at a solo career hadn’t gone over well with the other two members, and creative differences were becoming more pronounced. At the same time, The Wailers were more popular than ever, booking tours that brought them outside of Jamaica. After one final collaborative album, 1973’s Burnin’, Wailer and Tosh each separately departed the group. Marley retained The Wailers name but made it his backing band, allowing himself full creative control of the band’s music.
Catch a Fire represents the first time that Bob Marley officially started to deviate from The Wailers. Now becoming more comfortable with his role as main songwriter and band frontman, Marley’s increasing desire to control the creative process helped craft a darker, more political, and more funk-filled reggae record than anything the group had done before. It was the beginning of something much bigger, even if it also represented the beginning of the end for The Wailers as a trio.
