Bob Marley playlist
Friday, 13. May 2011
We mark the 30th anniversary of Marley’s death with a playlist of hits, obscurities and surprising cover version.
I Shot the Sheriff
Before most people had heard of Marley or the Wailers, they’d heard Eric Clapton’s anodyne version of his cop-killer song. Marley had wanted to sing “I shot the police,” but to do so would have fed the feud between Jamaican cops and the group that had already seen Bunny Wailer jailed on trumped-up charges. The song gave Clapton his only US number one, a debt he repaid with a drunken onstage rant about “fucking Jamaicans” the following year. In typical Marley fashion, the song slips from narrative into folk saying: “Every day the bucket a go a well, one day the bottom a go drop out.” Think about it.
No Woman, No Cry
The live version, recorded at London’s Lyceum in 1975, became Bob’s breakthrough hit. It’s still the one song that non-fans recognise and love. The big romantic chorus alternates with verses reminiscing about Bob’s days scuffling in Trenchtown and a second chorus that affirms the central promise of pop: “Everything’s gonna be alright.” Bob handed the songwriting credits to a friend, Vincent Ford, in gratitude for old times.
Get Up, Stand Up
A famous crowd-pleaser, with its singalong, militant chorus. Co-written with fellow Wailer Peter Tosh, the song has a political refrain but the three verses are pure Rasta, rejecting pie-in-the-sky Christianity for the belief that “Almighty God is a living man” (ie Haile Selassie).
Redemption Song
Endlessly covered, Bob’s swansong is as tender as it is profound. At the time he wrote it, Marley already suspected his days were numbered. The final track on his final album, the song is delivered, uncharacteristically, to solo acoustic guitar, heightening its intimate tone. Some lyrics are borrowed from a Selassie speech (”Emancipate yourself from mental slavery”), others from Revelation (”the bottomless pit”), but at the centre of the song is the simple retrospective confession of a man who grew from poverty to greatness: “All I ever had, these songs of freedom.”
