Bob Marley & the Wailers’ two shows at Convocation Hall in May 1976 came on Day 12 of the Rastaman Vibration tour. Though Marley had vied with Springsteen a year earlier as the hottest new act in music, Bruce had broken through immediately with “Born to Run” while Bob failed to chart. That changed in 1976 with “Rastaman Vibration”, just released on April 30 and headed for #8 on the charts. This was his year.

Having shown avid interest the year previous when the Wailers played Massey Hall on the so-called “Trenchtown Experience” world tour (which unfortunately I’d missed), Toronto was rewarded this season with a double show — one quite different from the another in content. It was the only city to demand a pair, apart from London, New York and Oakland, California.

I wasn’t going to miss this one. Marley had finally shown me what reggae really meant following a false start with Eric Clapton’s idiot-wind rendition of Bob’s “I Shot the Sheriff”. As soon as I heard Bob sing the song, I knew I’d found something important in the Jamaican rhythm, and lyrically in the passion of the daily struggle that continued, even for a national star like Marley, and in his case because of his national stardom. The year would end with him being shot in his Kingston home and his wife and his manager being very nearly killed.

Bob’s mother Cedella Booker, who lived in the US, had been present when the Rastaman Vibration tour began in Darby, Pennsylvania, less than two weeks before Toronto. Shortly after cancer killed him in 1981, she would astound the Wailers by getting onstage with them and singing his songs.

There had been a live album in ‘75, recorded at London’s Lyceum Ballroom, that demonstrated why the Wailers were a band that couldn’t be fully appreciated through studio tracks. They had to be seen in person. I saw the second of the shows at Con Hall, and it was riveting: The atmosphere was crackling and sparking like a bonfire. I hate cliches, but have to go there: Words cannot do this experience justice.

The effect — and it was nothing if not genuine alchemy — was the result of mixing three elements: Marley’s powerful songs, slickly composed with tried-and-true grappling hooks and spiced with live surprises, simple yet movingly profound; the band’s astonishing crispness and unity; and Bob’s shamanistic performance.

This last component was the main key to enchanting audiences, in the literal sense, and what confounded reviewers the most. You can even see it on videotape if you pay attention long enough. Only one other performer that I’ve seen came close to mastering the voodoo like Bob Marley, and that was another reggae artist, Burning Spear.

Bob was known almost from birth as a duppy conqueror, a slayer of ghosts, and after long years of honing his talents he had developed the full range of performance tricks, up to and including “that natural mystic blowing through the air”. Just like a classic witch doctor he would prance, strut, cower, shake himself, pause to consider, speak out, command, thrust his head back and howl, ululating. He was evoking the spirits, at times almost speaking in tongues.

Here’s one trick, though I can’t say for sure that Marley employed it consciously. He would mutter and slur lines, lyrics that he knew were familiar to his listeners. The audience would cock their ears and figuratively lean in to catch what he was saying. Then Bob would open up fully on a line, giving the chosen words crystal clarity while at the same time dramatically boosting the overall song’s dynamism. This ebb and flow of legibility had the effect of focusing and maintaining our attention. Perhaps no one other than Dylan has been so intense about phrasing, but Dylan can be hit and miss, not Marley. He cut right through.

The fundamental rhythm of reggae is deceptively simple, with most of the listener’s notice given to the chop of the guitar. The Wailers’ Al Anderson was mesmerising, carried along by the mighty current of the Barrett brothers, Aston “Family Man” on bass and Carlton on drums, and with Alvin “Seeco” Patterson adding trim on percussion. And as soon as you took your eyes off Al you were apt to be pulled right back by his trilling lead licks. Meanwhile Tyrone Downie and Earl “Wire” Lindo’s keyboards were all the time sawing through the rhythm, occasionally swelling crescendo-like but usually providing a back spin to the melody set up by the others.

Against all this, the harmonies of the I-Threes, Bob’s “three little birds” — Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths — were alternatively giving the show a joyful bounce or, more likely, a sobering undertone of impending danger, to match Marley’s warnings about wayward Babylon. The I-Threes’ seamless call-and-response exchanges with Bob are deservedly the stuff of legend. I saw them a couple of times after he was gone; it was never the same.

Them belly full, but we hungry
A hungry mob is a angry mob
A rain a-fall, but the dirt it tough
A pot a-cook, but d’ food no ‘nough
You’re gonna dance to Jah music, dance …

“Them Belly Full” came third in the setlist for the late show at Con Hall, which began with the drummed beckoning of “Rastaman Chant”. We were summoned to see the travelling physician, the healing herbsman perform an exorcism. Bob laid out the problem with “Slave Driver”, then reaffirmed that there wasn’t enough food for everyone in this world.

One suggested prescription took the form of “Rebel Music” and “I Shot the Sheriff”, but the ambiguity of the latter song left doubt about the wisdom of violence. So there was more morbid meditation: “Rat Race”, “Johnny Was”. Another possible remedy: “Roots, Rock, Reggae”. No. “Want More”. Well then, “Positive Vibration”, “Get Up Stand Up”. Finally, despite the brutal, inescapable fact of “War” (”Until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes, me say war”), in the end, “No More Trouble”.

(Interestingly, and unusually for such tours, those at the early show got a different setlist which, unfortunately for me, included several other of my favourites — “No Woman No Cry”, “Lively Up Yourself” and “Crazy Baldhead” — though the overall structure and the underlying message were the same.)

By the time the band rolled into the Roxy in Los Angeles two months later, there were Hollywood stars and rock heavyweights muscling for tickets to see them. The tour carried on to Europe, with five successive, sold-out nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, before wrapping up on June 27 in Manchester.

Since included in official record of this tour’s itinerary is the historic December 5 “Smile Jamaica” concert at National Heroes Park in Marley’s native Kingston. Bob performed there despite having been shot two days earlier at his home on Hope Road, a lashing-out of the country’s election-eve political frenzy.

Then he left the island for England and, more resolved than ever, recorded “Exodus”, which did even better in sales. There were four more years left to him, more great songs, more duppies to conquer, more hearts to win. “Me music will go on forever,” Bob is reported to have once said. “Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts.”

The Dorseyland tribute to Bob Marley is here with a link to my Google Earth commemorative tour.

Briton Andy Clayden offers recordings of both of the Convocation shows and many other regaae concerts on his very cool “Django” website, for trading, not for sale.

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Bob’s band carried on, and still do, albeit in physically and spiritually depleted form. I was lucky enough to see them at Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica just three months after Bob died, perhaps understandably reticent about the loss (the enormous impact of which hadn’t really sunk in yet for anyone at that time) and more focused on providing at least an acceptable pastiche of his songs and the backup for the Marley family members who performed — Rita and their children, the still pubescent Ziggy, Stephen and Sharon, who would soon form the Melody Makers.

In August 1987 Rita Marley & the Wailers performed at Varsity Arena for a steamy evening of reggae, ganja smoke wafting through the hockey rink’s reverberating acoustics. There was, of necessity, more confidence in the band’s renderings now, more spirited evocation of their absent leader. Rita’s singing was a treat, as always, but I don’t recall noticing any heartbroken plaintiveness in her delivery, as one might have expected, or at least hoped for. The will to carry on must have been truly sagging under the weight of the estate’s legal wrangles and the many promises made and still waiting to be honoured.

In September ‘89 Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers had a gig at a dance club in Mississauga, outside Toronto. The music was fine — they had some great tunes — and Ziggy was very much his father’s spitting image, visually and aurally, but it was the wrong place to appreciate them properly. Too provincial, too mundane, too Babylon.

Carlton Barrett, who quit the Wailers when Bob died, was shot dead in a domestic horror in 1987. Al Anderson shook off his alcohol anaconda to lead the band in the studio and on tour, the vocals split between Tyrone Downie and guitarist Junior Marvin, with Family Man Barrett still on bass, Wia Lindo still on percussion and Mikey “Boo” Richards on drums. There are new guys on board as the band continues to tour today, Family Man always the designated driver, and still grumbling about songwriting credits he never got.

* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory