There’s a case to be made for referring to the Wailers – Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer – as the Jamaican Beatles. Like the Fab Four, the Wailers helped revolutionize music in their native land during the ‘60s. And yes, their music would be seen as groundbreaking and life-changing by millions all over the world. And yes, each band’s members would go on to make memorable music as solo performers. One could even extend the analogy to include assassins silencing both bands’ most politically strident voices (Tosh and John Lennon), and the survivors (Wailer and, mostly, Paul McCartney) being seen as standard-bearers of a certain gravitas in their respective genres.
Trying to draw those lines ignores some major differences, though. First, the Beatles made a lot more money in the ‘60s than the Wailers did. Their music, once it entered the mainstream (read: American) pop marketplace, went global immediately, whereas the Wailers’ work from that same period didn’t reach much of the planet until years later (and often through bootleg reissues, at that). We all know who “The Beatles” were, but there’s a difference between “The Wailers”, three ragamuffin strugglers whose union collapsed scant months after they finally achieved some success, and “Bob Marley and the Wailers”, the international juggernaut that for most of its existence included neither Tosh nor Wailer.
If there’s any real parallel between them, it’s that they both turned out to be bands of brothers. Each of them about the same age, they grew up in public during a turbulent time. Their music and lifestyles reflected much of the tenor of the ‘60s, as they sang about everything from love and unity to their countries’ economies to alternative faiths. Key periods of their work were shaped by singular figures they would soon outgrow (Lee “Scratch” Perry and Brian Epstein). In the process of becoming counter-culture icons, they had to work through various personal challenges, and relied on each other to help overcome them. But in the end, both bands grew apart, as the respective brothers’ differing artistic impulses, egos and basic attitudes about life and each other became too much to sustain.
Yet even at all that, the connections don’t completely hold. The Wailers were much more emblematic of Jamaica than the Beatles were of England. They came of age as men and musicians during the first decade of Jamaica’s independence, and their lives and music deeply reflected the new nation’s vestiges of colonial racism, political corruption, chronic poverty, and class conflicts. It’s not all that big a leap to argue that one can’t know how those three ragamuffin strugglers became counter-culture icons without knowing more about Jamaica than sunshine and ganja. That’s the central assertion behind BBC historian Colin Grant’s The Natural Mystics, an illuminating study which often reads more like a biography of a country than of a reggae band.
Grant doesn’t begin his story when the Wailers first recorded, or even when the individual men were born. He traces his history back to 1938, when a series of riots over pay at a major factory ratcheted up the tension between Jamaica’s rich white minority and its poor black majority. Grant goes into detail on characters like Alexander Bustamonte, essentially the island’s first modern civil rights leader, and Norman Manley: attorney, Bustamonte’s cousin, future Prime Minister, and the father of another future Prime Minister. It’s riveting material in his hands, but he disrupts expectations of a chronological narrative flow with his observations of present-day Jamaica.
His account of the statue Negro Aroused is a case in point. An iconic ‘30s emblem of black Jamaica’s nascent pride, it now sits neglected in a sleepy museum. Grant tells of his encounter with it during a trip to Jamaica researching for this book, shifting from scholarly history to first-person reportage without much warning. The toggling between past and present, which happens frequently here, creates a frustrating effect for readers caught in his story; there are moments when you’d wish he’d have saved the tales of his countryside adventures for a travel piece. But the time shifts also lend an extra dimension to the history lesson, by capturing essences of the Jamaican character that aren’t contained in facts and dates.
By the time the chronology advances to the early ‘40s, when Marley, Tosh (nee Peter McIntosh) and Wailer (nee Neville Livingston) were born (Grant doesn’t dispense with their actual birth dates), Grant has established the grinding poverty, racial inequality and misogyny that characterized the Jamaica of their youth. He alludes to their budding musical talent, but spends more time developing the personal dynamics between the youths (Marley and Wailer met when Marley’s mother took a job in the corner shop owned by Wailer’s father, and also did some housekeeping).
Life in Trench Town, the heart of the Kingston ghetto, was hard, but music soon emerged as a safety valve. In the late ‘50s, Jamaican music began to evolve from weak reflections of American jazz and r&b into its own distinctive style. Soon, Kingston’s mobile dj’s (known as “sound systems”) started making their own records, and eventually other local entrepreneurs got into the act. One of them, Chinese grocer Leslie Kong, was the first to record any of our heroes (Marley: “Judge Not,” 1962), although they had already started to hone their musical chops as a trio.
It’s here where Grant’s true interest becomes clearest. Most existing chronicles of the Wailers, including the various Marley-specific biographies, continue from this point forward primarily focused on key milestones in the band’s development: Joe Higgs giving them singing lessons; the beginning of the relationship with producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd; their 1963 hit “Simmer Down;” and so on. But Grant instead ventures into a lengthy discussion of the role spirit worship plays in Jamaican folklore, distilling the success of “Simmer Down” into not much more than one sentence. Again and again, Grant’s approach insists that before we can fully appreciate the Wailers, we must fully appreciate the milieu that formed them. At least the lectures don’t all land with a thud, as Grant injects periodic doses of cynicism and understatement into his readings of the past.
Rasta Around the World
People interested in the music might not have the patience for this much cultural backstory (most other Marley/Wailers histories keep it to a minimum), but music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by the cultural forces of the hour, and it returns the favor. Grant carefully builds that case here, revealing how the Wailers’ individual personalities began to emerge against the backdrop of post-independence Jamaica and its continuing class divides (curiously, Grant makes little mention of perhaps the most important moment in Jamaican history, its gaining independence from mother England in 1962).
No group came to symbolize those divides more than the dreadlock-wearing, ganja-smoking Rastafarians. For decades they’d been scorned by the Jamaican mainstream, to say nothing of the police. Eventually, a charismatic, well-spoken Rasta, Mortimo Planno, emerged as the key figure in Kingston’s Rasta community. The sessions of “reasoning,” informal bull sessions and explanations of the Rasta way of thinking, became widely known throughout Trench Town; it’s not too farfetched to think of Planno as akin to the Malcolm X of the early ‘60s, translating for a new generation the ways of a mysterious underground tribe, one with its own cosmology and an appearance that confounded the establishment. Planno guided the Wailers into Rastafari, but he was not quite so mystical as to not want a piece of the musical pie.
Grant does fans of Jamaican music a huge service by spending so much time on Planno, and Rastafari in general. It was a presence on the island well before independence, and it took on even greater significance after the visit of Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie in 1966 (Rastas believe they saw the stigmata in his hand when he waved to the crowd during his visit, thus confirming him in their eyes as Christ in the flesh). It’s long been axiomatic that reggae music had a heavy Rasta vibe throughout the roots era of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Grant takes us deeply into Jamaican life to show how Rastafari took hold of a generation of young men, whose music would then take Jamaica – and Rasta – around the world. In this respect and others, The Natural Mystics might be the most thorough and accessible Jamaican history book a music fan might ever need.
But it probably isn’t the only Marley/Wailers book that fan might need. Without at least a rudimentary knowledge of the entire Wailers timeline, readers might be a little rudderless when it comes to grasping the basic facts about the band. And forget about understanding the music itself; Grant makes no pretences towards music criticism or analysis. What he does do is flesh out the stories and personalities of Tosh and Wailer, sometimes at the expense of the far better-known (and much more written-about) Marley. (Thus, it’s a little ironic that the book’s title comes from a Marley solo song.) We end up seeing the arc and inter-personal dynamics of the trio’s run, from its Trench Town roots, to its desperation after years of getting shafted by various producers and ill-fated ventures, to its eventual breakthrough with the passionate backing of Chris Blackwell at Island Records.
After the first two albums for Island, Tosh and Wailer departed for solo careers, leaving Marley to carry the Wailers name across the globe without his original bandmates. Grant doesn’t spend much time on the subsequent solo careers, save for pivotal events in their lives (the 1976 attempted hit on Marley and his appearance at a benefit concert two nights later, Marley’s and Tosh’s performances at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert, their respective deaths). In the end, Bunny Wailer looms triumphant, approaching 70 content in Jamaican semi-seclusion after an incredible run from boyhood struggling to international stardom.
A stretch like that suggests that there’s a Wailers biopic to be gleaned from their story (as opposed to the various Marley biopic projects that have surfaced from time to time). The Natural Mystics is not a particularly clear road map toward such a treatment: Grant’s insistence on including history, nuance and present-day asides doesn’t jibe with how most rock band stories have traditionally been told. But the Wailers weren’t just a rock band: their emergence into the international spotlight paralleled that of their nation, and the music Marley, Tosh and Wailer made as a band over ten years both reflected and was rooted in their experiences as Jamaicans trying to survive Jamaica. Grant’s book seems only nominally about music much of the time, and it’s far from the smoothest read, but it’s all the history, nuance and present-day asides that will contribute to any true appreciation of one of pop music’s most important bands, ever.