FROM THE VAULT (ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2015)
It seems like a long time ago when I was sitting in my living room, listening to Burnin’, and Bob Marley’s image on the cover of the album spoke to me.
Burnin’ Album Cover Picture.
TheWailers Burnin’
I wrote down what he said—in Patois—which I do not speak. I called what I had written down, “Heal the Nation.” Over the years, I made a song of some form of those words and played it with The One Drop as a drum chant. Later, I recorded it in other versions with Tom and Kathee. This summer, many things about the song came clear to me. I experienced my own personal need to heal and saw the same need in people all around me. The Karma Refugees recorded the song in July. While we were working on recording the tracks, we called the rewritten song, “Healing.” Here, in 2015, is what Bob Marley’s image told me so many years ago.
Heal the Nation
Sufferahs caused by slavery
An’ live in the system (shitstem) that’s slavery’s child
An, live in the depot of slavery’s trade (in Jamaica)
Live in the dread pit slavery made
The Sufferahs got nothin’ to lose
When the slavery system falls
When the ego system dies down slow
When the empire system rots.
Chorus
At the foot of Babel Tower
At the foot of the Bankers of Babylon
Where the language all fuck up
That’s how they make you do what they want
An the Sufferahs found the little herb
Grown on the grave of King Solomon
The wisdom that grows from the earth
They called the Healing of the Nation.
Chorus
Heal the nation girl and woman
Heal the nation boy and man
We’ve been down in the valley for a mighty long time
Heal the nation if we can
At the foot of Babel Tower
At the foot of the bankers of Babylon
Where the language all fuck up
That’s how they make you do what they want.
An’ then the Rastas called the little herb
“The Bread of the Lamb”
An’ the power that comes from the earth
They call the Healing of all Nations
Chorus
Heal the nation girl and woman
Heal the nation boy and man
We’ve been down in this valley for a mighty long time
Heal the nation if we can.
“Heal The Nation,” The Karma Refugees, 2015.
Song Writing, guitar – Mike Opitz
Vocals – Kathleen Downes
Bass – Tom Daddesio
Keyboards – Caitlin Brutger
1. Learning to Hear Reggae
The first reggae song I heard was “Concrete Jungle.”
I had purchased two new records—Catch a Fire (1972) and Natty Dread (1974) as presents for myself after surviving my first semester of teaching at CSBSJU. I remember being intrigued by the covers but had no idea what the music would sound like. I thought the records may have contained some kind of Caribbean sea chanteys or calypso music—which I had loved as a kid. But really, I was just in the mood to give myself a reward.
The present I gave myself grew to become the education of a lifetime. I drove home—in the mode of Jonathan Richman—“Going faster miles an hour/ with the radio on.” I was still a kid at heart and summer vacation was about to begin. Music has always been the heartbeat of summer for me. I fired up my turntable, heard the needle settle into “Concrete Jungle,” and my transformation began.
I have learned that Chris Blackwell polished up The Wailers’ music, added Wayne Perkins’ famous guitar overdub to “Concrete Jungle,” and marketed the band as a black rock band. Catch a Fire was crafted to reach white audiences. It worked on me. The guitar solo won my heart. Blackwell had set out to make a deep Jamaican roots music from the African Diaspora available to white audiences.* Rock had already made the journey from slave music through blues to reach white audiences as rock and roll. But something had been washed out of the music in the process. The something was an awareness of the history of a people. The economic and personal suffering of the blues refracted through the culture industry transformed into teenage angst. The real pain of life under the oppression of capitalism and racism vanished from the music. I have an image from my teenage years of a mob of baby-boom kids rocking out at a summer playground dance. We all wanted to “dance ‘til a quarter to three … with Daddy G.”
We had no idea where this music came from. If someone was called “Daddy G”—that was cool. We had no idea of African-American slang. We just wanted to talk like that. We thought the music was made by peppy teenagers like us living lives of high-school drama. Black music came to American teenagers as ahistorical, disembodied soundtracks for our teenage years.
The first two songs of Catch a Fire tell you exactly where the music comes from. This is how I learned it. From “Concrete Jungles” all over the world where descendants of colonized or enslaved people try to make their voices heard. When these voices grow more and more audible, Bob Marley asserts: “Slave Driver/ the tables are turn./ Catch a fire/ You’re gonna get burn.” When I heard The Wailers for the first time, I knew that the words were just a part of it. The harmonies (“started out cryin’”), the amazing punctuation of bass line and drum beat, and the whole groove all revealed meanings. The political and economic oppression of a racist system— in reggae labeled as “Babylon” and “Babylon System”—comes back into rock music in these two songs.
I stumbled upon my first two Wailers records by accident. I bought Catch a Fire—their first release for Chris Blackwell and Island Records–the album Blackwell designed to reach white, middle-class audiences. The second album I bought was –Natty Dread—the first album after Bunny and Peter, childhood friends and founding members, left the group–released under the name of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Here I heard mysterious Rasta philosophy embellished by the more conventional but lovely harmonies of the I-Threes. The mix was soulful—using horns and saxophone as well as drum and bass. Looking back, it seems that both albums were aimed at reaching people like me. Blackwell wanted to tap into the lucrative American and British markets; Marley wanted to express a worldview that had been repressed for centuries.
Both albums succeeded in reaching me. I had been able to hear reggae music because my ear had been trained by electric guitar solos, and clever back-up vocals of the rock and roll I had grown up with. Once I was drawn into the music, I was able to explore it and discover the depth and beauty at its core. But for some reason, I had missed the second Wailer’s Island record, Burnin‘(1973). In this record, the Wailers returned to their roots. Gone were the overdubbed guitar solos. The unique Wailers’ harmonies—developed on the streets of Trenchtown—came back in full bloom. The politics was evident and radical. I had discovered and loved The Wailers without knowing “Get Up Stand Up”—still one of the most radical songs ever recorded.
Here is “Get Up Stand Up” from a concert at the Rainbow Theater in London (1977) This is years after Burnin’ was released—but the music was reaching white kids.
I was one of those people and the feeling was exciting and exhilarating. Once I had heard and understood the songs of Catch a Fire and the odd Rastafarian words (like “Jah,”“Irie,” “I ‘n I” ff.), I was ready to hear Burnin’.
2. Discovering a Worldview
The excitement of discovery that I felt with each new Marley song is hard to describe. Each step takes you deeper into understanding the politics of racism and post-colonial empires and at the same time takes you deeper into a strange, marijuana-inflected spirituality, Rastafarianism. As Mikal Gilmore has noted: “Catch a Fire was a landmark: It was the first wholly formed, cohesive reggae album, and it immediately cast Marley into the artistic big leagues….” This attraction to the music is true for my first experience of reggae. Gilmore writes: “But Marley’s early-to-mid 1970’s Island recordings are something a good deal more than pioneering entertainment: They put forth an uncompromising and startling vision of a society kept in hell and ready to storm the gates. Songs like
“Burnin’ and Lootin,’
“Small Axe,”
“Concrete Jungle,” “Revolution,”
“Them Belly Full (But We Hungry),”
and “War” … brandish unsettling images and incendiary pronouncements that are among the most authentic in modern music” (Gilmore 16).*
In the previous clip, a live version of “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry),” the electric guitar weaves into the reggae groove, and the stark poetry of the lyric. The white audience “digs” this as the clip shows.
One day when I was in the midst of my study of reggae as post-colonial discourse and also when I picked up my long dormant guitar and started playing Marley songs, I finally purchased Burnin’—several years after it had been released. I fired up the turntable, heard the needle settle into “Get Up Stand Up” and my transformation grew deeper and more real. The album jacket leaned against a bookshelf, and the images on the cover seemed to stare out at me. This song, “Heal the Nation,” took root and grew out of that stare and what it said to me.
Bob Marley and the Wailers, “War/ No More Trouble” live at the Rainbow Theater, London, 1977.
Notes
- The original Jamaican tracks for Catch a Fire have been released in deluxe edition (2001)
- Mikal Gilmore, “How Bob Marley Changed the World,” Rolling Stone: Special Collector’s Edition. June, 2014.
The entire Live at the Rainbow (1979) concert is available here.
Mike Opitz Song Writing and Theory Project 