FEATURE:
So Much Things to Say
Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Exodus at Forty-Five
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NOT only one of the most influential…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Rainbow Rehearsals, Basing Street Studios, London in 1977
Reggae albums of all time, Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Exodus is considered to be one of the greatest albums ever. Released on 3rd June, 1977, I wanted to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of a classic. As it turns forty-five next month, I would encourage people to buy the album. On 3rd December, 1976, Bob Marley survived an assassination attempt in which his chest was grazed, and his arm was struck with a bullet, but he survived. After this harrowing incident, Marley left Jamaica and was exiled to London, where Exodus was recorded. Containing some of the group’s best work – including Waiting in Vain, Jamming, Exodus, and Three Little Birds – Exodus is an immaculate collection! Perhaps not as urgent and political as some of Bob Marley & The Wailers’ other work, Exodus is more accessible…though it is full of important songs and phenomenal performances. Before coming to a couple of glowing reviews for Exodus, there are articles that explain the story behind the album. The first feature, from udiscovermusic.com, looks back at Bob Marley’s role as a political and spiritual figure:
“A key figure of power and political influence”
Even before Exodus, Marley had become one of the best-known figures in the Third World. As Timothy White noted in Catch A Fire: The Life Of Bob Marley, the reggae star was “quoted as a poet, heralded as the West Indian Bob Dylan, even the Jamaican Jomo Kenyatta [Prime Minister and founding father of post-colonial Kenya].” This made Marley a key figure of power and political influence, whether he liked it or not. On returning to Jamaica after the Rastaman Vibration tour in 1976, he soon found himself caught up in events leading up to the general election of December 15.
The standing Prime Minister Michael Manley cajoled Marley into agreeing to perform at a free concert called Smile Jamaica, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, to be staged ten days before the election. Manley reasoned that this “Jamaican Woodstock” would help to defuse tensions on the street before the election, while no doubt hoping it would deliver him a significant propaganda coup into the bargain. Tensions, however, remained anything but defused when, just after sunset on December 3, two cars drove through the front gate of Marley’s home at 56 Hope Road and unloaded several armed men who attacked the house where the Wailers were rehearsing.
Marley was hit by a bullet that creased his breast below his heart and lodged in his left arm. His wife Rita’s skull was grazed by a bullet that left her miraculously unharmed, while Marley’s manager, Don Taylor, was hit by five bullets in his lower body, which also somehow failed to kill him. The Smile Jamaica Concert went ahead at the National Heroes Park, Kingston two days later on 5 December. With the bullet still lodged in his arm, Marley demonstrated exactly why his street name was Tuff Gong, as he and the Wailers courageously put on a 90-minute performance in front of an audience of 80,000 fans, which mercifully passed off without incident. The next morning, Marley flew out of Jamaica and would not return for more than a year.
Shared punk’s outsider perspective of society
While his music had little in common with the abrasive, adrenaline-rush sound of punk rock, Marley shared punk’s outsider perspective of society as part of an established order that needed to change. After the Clash included Junior Murvin’s “Police And Thieves” on their first album, Marley wrote “Punky Reggae Party,” a song with a guest list that made his own allegiances abundantly clear. “New wave, new craze/The Jam, the Damned, the Clash/Wailers still be there/Dr Feelgood too,” he sang. The number was released as the B-side to “Jamming,” which reached No.9 in the UK singles chart, confirming Marley as a key figure in forging the unlikely but enduring alliance between UK punk and reggae.
The brush with death in Jamaica and the ensuing change of scene seemed to galvanize Marley creatively. “After the shooting, me never want to just think about shooting,” Marley told Vivien Goldman of Sounds. “So me just ease up me mind and go in a different bag. What me stand for me always stand for. Jah [God] is my strength.” The “different bag” was, in truth, not so different from previous albums, but Marley was now tapping into the motherlode with new confidence and urgency. There were two distinct sides to Exodus – literally so in its original vinyl format.
On Side One, the fire and brimstone was brought from simmering to boiling point as Marley offered a fiercely religious and politicized prescription for solving the ills of the world in a series of songs – “Natural Mystic,” “So Much Things To Say,” “Guiltiness,” “The Heathen” – each more messianic than the last. The side closed with the title track, a rippling, surging, seven-minute call to arms for a nation of displaced souls on the march to a new spiritual homeland. “We know where we’re going/We know where we’re from/We’re leaving Babylon,” Marley sang against a cyclical riff that was turned, like clay on a potter’s wheel, to perfection.
Sermon over, the party kicked off on Side Two with “Jamming,” the song which would later inspire Stevie Wonder’s ode to Marley “Masterblaster.” “Waiting In Vain” was a yearning expression of unrequited love that emphasized Marley’s often-overlooked skill and sense of humor as a lyric writer: “It’s been three years since I’m knocking on your door/And I still can knock some more/Ooh girl, is it feasible?” he pleaded. After the simple expression of optimism encapsulated in “Three Little Birds” (“Every little thing gonna be all right”), the album ended with a reprise of the Wailers 1965 single “One Love” an inspirational message of faith, harmony, and solidarity now spliced to the Curtis Mayfield tune of “People Get Ready”.
Classic Album Sundays is a magnificent album that has influenced and inspired so many people since 1977. It is a record that will go down as one of the all-time greats. The mixture of beauty and power makes it such a broad and appealing album that appeals to Reggae diehards and those who are not huge fans of the genre:
“Released in the summer of 1977, Bob Marley and The Wailers’ ‘Exodus’ is considered one of the most important reggae albums of all time. It spawned five hit singles: ‘Exodus’, ‘Waiting In Vain’, ‘Jamming’, ‘Three Little Birds’ and ‘One Love / People Get Ready’, peaked at Number 20 on the Billboard Pop Chart and was coined ‘the best album of the 20th century’ by Time magazine in 1999. It propelled Bob Marley into international stardom and set the stage for his most memorable performance at the One Love Peace Concert where he joined the hands of opposing party members Michael Manley of the People’s National Party and Edward Seaga of the Jamaican Labor Party.
The album is Marley’s most political and religious work but it also features beautiful, vivacious and downright funky and sexy jams. As a committed Rastafarian, Marley would often quote from The Bible, so it was no surprise that he chose to name his album after The Old Testament’s second book which portrays the exodus of the Israelites. However, there is another reason for the title choice as ‘Exodus’ also portrays a man experiencing his own personal exodus.
Marley and his wife Rita were shot in 1976 during an invasion into their own home two days before they were to play at the Smile Jamaica concert which was primarily an election rally for Michael Manley who was Jamaican Prime Minister at the time. They were both seriously wounded but despite the assassination attempt, Marley played the show and afterward he and his crew promptly left for London.
London was not only the other home of Island boss Chris Blackwell, but also the home of thousands of Jamaicans who had their own distinct community within the city. ‘Exodus’ was recorded at Blackwell’s Basing Street Studios in London in West London which was one heart of the Jamaican community. There in the Ladbroke Grove area is where Notting Hill Carnival started and clubs like the Metro Youth Club featured sounds like Dennis Bovell’s Sufferer Hi-Fi who played dub plates from Marley’s work in progress”.
To properly mark the approaching forty-fifth anniversary of Exodus, it is worth uniting a couple of reviews. AllMusic gave their thoughts on a mighty and enormously important album;
“After the success of 1974's Natty Dread and 1976's Rastaman Vibration, Bob Marley was not only the most successful reggae musician in the world, he was one of the most powerful men in Jamaica. Powerful enough, in fact, that he was shot by gunmen who broke into his home in December 1976, days before he was to play a massive free concert intended to ease tensions days before a contentious election for Jamaican Prime Minister. In the wake of the assassination attempt, Marley and his band left Jamaica and settled in London for two years, where he recorded 1977's Exodus. Thematically, Exodus represented a subtle but significant shift for Marley; while he continued to speak out against political corruption and for freedom and equality for Third World people, his lyrics dealt less with specifics and more with generalities and the need for peace and love (though "So Much Things to Say," "Guiltiness," and "The Heathen" demonstrate the bullets had taken only so much sting out of Marley's lyrics).
And while songs like "Exodus" and "One Love/People Get Ready" were anthemic, they also had less to say than the more pointed material from Marley's earlier albums. However, if Marley had become more wary in his point of view (and not without good cause), his skill as a songwriter was as strong as ever, and Exodus boasted more than a few classics, including the title song, "Three Little Birds," "Waiting in Vain," and "Turn Your Lights Down Low," tunes that defined Marley's gift for sounding laid-back and incisive at once. His gifts as a vocalist were near their peak on these sessions, bringing a broad range of emotional color to his performances, and this lineup of the Wailers -- anchored by bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett, drummer Carlton Barrett, and guitarist Julian "Junior" Murvin -- is superb, effortlessly in the pocket throughout. Exodus was recorded at a time when Bob Marley was learning about the unexpected costs of international stardom, but it hadn't yet sapped his creative strengths, and this is one of the finest albums in his stellar catalog”.
I am going to wrap things up with another review. This one comes from the BBC. They argued how Exodus should be ranked alongside the very best work from Bob Marley & The Wailers – maybe sitting at the top spot:
“Widely considered to be his best work, no other album has as many tracks featured on Legend; the biggest selling reggae record of all time. Exodus was also recorded between two key events in the Marley story; the assassination attempt and the One Love Peace Concert, marking his transformation from rebel to superstar in the eyes of the world.
Fittingly, it’s an album of two halves; opening with the slow fade-up of ''Natural Mystic'', followed by the exuberant ''So Much Things To Say''; with Bob’s reggae-scat on the final verse mimicking the ‘nonsense talk’ all around him. ''Guiltiness'' and ''The Heathen'' explore darker territory, before the glorious primordial shuffle of the title track.
''Jamming'' signals the change in tone, followed by ''Waiting In Vain'' (how to write the perfect love song using a few deft strokes) and the Clapton-esque ''Turn Your Lights Down Low'' (how not to). The album closes with the uplifting ''Three Little Birds'', and Curtis Mayfield adaptation ''One Love''.
Exodus was book-ended by the less well-received Rastaman Vibration and Kaya, which, oddly, both possess the one thing Exodus doesn’t; a sense of unity across the tracks. While the earlier songs could easily have ended up on Kaya (the sessions overlapped) the later ones sound like they came from a different session altogether”.
I know people will talk about Exodus on the forty-fifth anniversary on 3rd June. During a glorious run of albums from Bob Marley & The Wailers, Exodus arrived in the world. It must have been amazing hearing it for the first time! Forty-five years later, the album still sounds glorious and really like nothing else that has been recorded! Split over two halves – the more political compared with songs that are slower in tempo -, the amazing Exodus is…
A world-class album.