Bob Marley And The Wailers: The Capitol Session ‘73

By Harvey Kubernik Copyright 2021  

During October of 1973, international reggae pioneers the Wailers were filmed in a closed door session at The Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood on October 24th by famed record producer (Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Georgie Fame, the Move, Joe Cocker) Denny Cordell, who captured the band recording 12 songs. Shooting with four cameras and mixing “on the fly” to a colorized tape, this footage, has been painstakingly restored, resulting in an incredible presentation of this unseen live session.

On September 3, Tuff Gong and Mercury Studios are proud to present this concert (almost 50 years after it was recorded): Bob Marley And The Wailers: The Capitol Session ‘73 on DVD+CD, standalone CD, 2LP pressed on green marble vinyl, 2LP pressed on Rasta swirl vinyl (red, yellow and green – available exclusively at Sound of Vinyl), and digital formats. 

 This session at Capitol Studios represented a unique moment in the band’s career. Filmed 10 years after their formation, the Wailers already had several established hits through the ska and rocksteady eras. 

Gaining recognition stateside, including a few shows with Bruce Springsteen at Max’s Kansas City in New York City, they then went on to tour with Sly and the Family Stone, before they had been unceremoniously dumped from the tour. This led to the band (Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Joe Higgs, Aston Barrett, Carlton Barrett, Earl “Wya” Lindo) making their way to Hollywood to do this session.

The footage from this session was considered lost until a freelance researcher uncovered a few frames. For over 20 years, archives and storage units from New York and London to San Diego were tracked down and searched to retrieve fragments of the film, until it was fully unearthed, restored, and remastered. 

Track Listings:  “You Can't Blame the Youth,” “Slave Driver,” “Burnin' and Lootin',” “Rastaman Chant,” “Duppy Conqueror,” “Midnight Raver,” “Put It On,” “Stop that Train,” “Kinky Reggae,” “Stir It Up,” “No More Trouble,” and “Get Up Stand Up.”   DVD Bonus Tracks: “Duppy Conqueror” and “Rastaman Chant.”       

“In 1969, Jimmy Cliff “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” ‘Israelites,’ from Desmond Dekker & The Aces, and earlier in the ‘60s, and Johnny Nash’s ‘Hold Me Tight’ had received lots of radio airplay and sold records in the Los Angeles market and Stateside areas,” volunteered reggae scholar, author/deejay Roger Steffens. 

 “Nash had hired Bob Marley as a songwriter for his label and also a performer for JAD.  So a lot of Marley songs had come out without anyone knowing who Bob Marley was. Nash struck later with ‘I Can See Clearly Now.’

“Near the end of October, 1973 the Wailers came to Hollywood and rehearsed at Capitol Records,” specified Steffens.   

“In the fall of 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers were in inner turmoil. A few months earlier, co-founder Bunny Wailer, who had been raised as Bob's brother since his father moved in with Bob's mother in 1966, left the group. He was upset that Island Records' chief, Chris Blackwell, told the group he had signed in late 1972, that he wanted them to tour ‘freak clubs.’ 

“As I outlined in my recent book, So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley, Bunny's response to that suggestion was to ask Blackwell what he meant by freak clubs. ‘He said, well, you know, clubs where gay guys and gals, gals meet gals and guys meet guys and freak out. Drug business, all kind of stuff - freak.’ I said, ‘how you want to take us all in that direction? Why you want draw us down in dem kind of things? We is Rasta, we no stand for dem things.’ And Bunny quit the group on the spot.

 “Coming off the critical success of their international debut on Island, Catch a Fire, Blackwell wanted them to tour America for their follow up Burnin' which would prove to be the trio's final work together. 

“To replace Bunny, Bob invited the group's initial teacher, the great Joe Higgs, known as the father of reggae music because of his early tutoring of many of the music's initial stars. Higgs knew the harmonies and could play percussion, so he fit in perfectly as he rehearsed at the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood that October. The taping was October 24, 1973.  

 “Outside the famous tower sat a mobile mixing studio, wherein sat a white American, harmonica player and fine artist, Lee Jaffe, who experimented with a brand-new special effects board while the rehearsal went on. Bootleg tapes of the event have circulated since the '70s in collectors' circles. But legal difficulties remained for decades. 

“Ownership was claimed by Denny Cordell, who founded Shelter Records, and was championed throughout this period by a tireless British entrepreneur Martin Disney, who was largely responsible for its ultimate release,” reinforced Roger.

“Peter Tosh, who would leave the group too a few weeks after this film was made, is seen in an amazing duet with Bob on ‘Get Up Stand Up,’ where he sings some different lyrics as if to trip Bob up. But this final alignment, after ten years together, shows the tightness of their arrangements and how Bob was desperate to keep the Wailers' sound alive. It was Bob who wrote the song, but he gave a verse to Peter to create so that he could share in the writers' royalties. It was Tosh who wrote about being sick of the ‘bullshit game,’ and the mythology surrounding Jesus' name,” added Steffens. 

“All in all, this refreshing new look at the Wailers' final days together will shed a welcome light on the power of their creations. 

“I was angry for a long time that Chris almost took joy in the fact that he helped break up the group. Over the years I've begun to think differently - imagine the world without Bunny's Blackheart Man or Peter's Equal Rights. We got three times the music we would have had if the group had not broken up. The Sheltervision session shows what we lost.” 

 I’ve waited almost 50 years for an official retail copy of these recordings of the Wailers which Tuff Gong and Mercury Studios are issuing. 

In November 1972 I attended the debut screening of the reggae movie The Harder They Come the Perry Henzell-directed flick starred Jimmy Cliff, in Hollywood at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, when it was programmed as part of Filmex, the Los Angeles International Film Exposition. The room was packed.  The audience   applauded and cheered wildly. I have a memory of speaking with movie producer and director Roger Corman who acquired domestic distribution via his company New World Pictures. 

The local music and film climate was further altered by the December 26th -December 31, 1972 booking of The Harder They Come at the Nu-Art Theater in Westwood.  

Publicist, Michael Ochs, who I knew from his 1969-1972 tenure in Hollywood inside the PR department at Columbia Records, was hired by Denny Cordell to introduce The Harder They Come soundtrack album to reviewers.   

Michael wrote for Melody Maker in 1972 and we both went to a handful of June 1972 concerts by the Rolling Stones after the release of Exile on Main Street.  

In January 1973, Ochs mailed me a copy of The Harder They Come LP, a press kit and a mango fruit, in a burlap bag that arrived to my Zura Hall college dormitory at San Diego State University. The mailing sticker had the Mango/Capitol Records logo and address in Hollywood.  

At the time I had only written a couple of record reviews for The Hollywood Press. I attempted to place a story on reggae and soundtrack in the school’s newspaper, The Daily Aztec, and was immediately rejected. The hypnotic pulse of reggae from this vinyl was captivating and I loved the movie.   

 “Denny Cordell called me in 1972 and wanted me to do the publicity for the soundtrack,” remembered Michael Ochs in a July 2021 interview we conducted.  

 “I saw it at Filmex, and loved the soundtrack album. I fell in love with reggae. Denny and Leon Russell were partners in Shelter Records and Leon spent a lot of money on a remote recording truck. I was at the taping of the Wailers in October at the Capitol studio which was fun. It was like a big rehearsal leading to a real performance. 

“The rock press loved the movie and soundtrack. It was too unique for AM and FM radio. Black radio programmers were not receptive at all. At the time there was a dearth of originality. When this happens the media tend to go to roots music, like blues. 

“Reggae was the light at the end of the tunnel. It was important to promote it. I wasn’t sure if Toots [Hibbert] of the Maytals or Bob Marley was going to be the leader of the movement,” Ochs recalled.  

 “Denny agreed to fly me down to Kingston if I could get a story on the Wailers in Rolling Stone. So I called my friend Michael Thomas and he sold it to Stone.  RS paid for Michael to come from London to do the story. Chris Blackwell loaned us one of his houses for us to stay in - Me, Michael and photographer Arthur Gorson. 

“Robert Christgau didn't stay there but came at the same time to do a 5-part story for Newsday, a Long Island paper. 

“Michael and Arthur went into Trenchtown to interview Marley but they were the only 2 that were allowed in.  For the rest of the time we were down there, different reggae artists, including Toots were sent to the house to talk to Michael for the story. 

 “Denny then hired me to do PR for the Shelter label. He agreed to pay a salary, for   an office and secretary. J.J. Cale and Phoebe Snow were artists I worked with.”          

 There was a young college student in 1973 named James Cushing enrolled at University California Santa Cruz who emerged as the Pied Piper of reggae in Northern California. 

I met James in 1968 in Westwood at Senator Eugene McCarthy’s headquarters during his ‘68 United States run for President. Our function was to pass out bumper stickers in West Los Angeles. We supported poet McCarthy over Sen. Robert Kennedy in the Democratic campaign.  

In 1972, Cushing, my brother Kenneth and I attended the cosmic debut of the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the Whisky a Go Go. James became a deejay for decades and a Professor of English and Literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  

 “April 1973. All US troops are ‘fully withdrawn’ from Vietnam, abortion is legal, the trial of the Watergate burglars is front-page news, and in New York, the 110-story World Trade Center has just opened,” emailed Dr. James Cushing in July 2021. 

 “In ultra-mellow Santa Cruz, CA, serial murderer Ed Kemper, who has killed and mutilated three people known to me personally, has just turned himself in to police, and the sense of relief on campus is as tangible as the bark on the redwood trees. 

“I’m a sophomore at College V (now Porter College), living with my girlfriend in B-dorm, where pot is $15 an ounce, LSD is $2 a hit, and everyone’s young and sexually active. 

“You can tell, because everyone’s stereo is playing something new and provocative like last month’s Pink Floyd release, Dark Side of the Moon, or the brand-new one by this new English guy David Bowie, Alladin Sane. I’m writing record and concert reviews for the campus paper The City on a Hill Press, and Capitol has been generous enough to put me on their rock mailing list, so I get all their new releases, like Pink Floyd, and people come to my dorm room to check them out. 

“Well, Dark Side of the Moon was cool, but Capitol was distributing Chris Blackwell’s Island imprint, and sent campus critics another record that season by a new group called The Wailers — Catch a Fire, it was called, with a clever hinged cover resembling a Zippo lighter, and music that nobody in that building had ever heard before. 

 “The players were all black, but their sound wasn’t ‘soul’ or ‘funk’ in the Motown / Stax / James Brown / Aretha sense, and it wasn’t anything like Jimi or Sly & the Family Stone. The bass and guitars and drums were all plenty loud, but it wasn’t ‘rock’ either. 

 “The word ‘reggae’ was used in Capitol promotional material, but I didn’t know how to pronounce it — soft ‘g’ or hard? — and at the level that mattered most, that was all right. 

 “Marley’s sound was just the thing we needed after weeks of local terror and political uncertainty: something sexy and relaxing, thoughtful and physical, totally new and totally cool. 

 “For most of that quarter, mid-April to mid-June 1973, Catch a Fire was the #1 party album in my part of B-dorm, with ‘Kinky Reggae’ the one that got everyone moving (‘a candy star / all on his chocolate bar,’ ‘light brown sugar / all over her booger-wooger’). 

“I believe that place on the time-line qualifies us as the first reggae-heads in Santa Cruz. Residents of that floor in that building that quarter will likely remember these parties well. Stir it up, midnight ravers!”   

“Then Michael Thomas wrote an article in June 1973 in Rolling Stone on the Wailer’s album Catch a Fire,” emphasized Roger Steffens. 

“It was six months after the movie had been released and there was a buzz with the movie playing every weekend on the midnight movie circuit. It was a seismic event that further changed the complexion of music in Los Angeles and the United States.”    

 Everybody I knew in Hollywood and all over the Southern California had copies of the Wailers’ debut Catch a Fire.  

On the day Duke Ellington died, May 24, 1974, I encountered Johnny Nash in the lobby of Columbia Records on Sunset Blvd. Johnny was enjoying success stemming from his 1972 hit single, “I Can See Clearly Now.” 

 We had a very brief chat. Johnny nodded when I mentioned a song, “Some of Your Love,” co-written with record producer Phil Spector in 1961 when he was signed to ABC-Paramount Records. Spector first met Nash, and songwriter Tommy Boyce, during their Army physical examination.  

As Johnny and I left the elevator ride, I wished I would have said to him how much I loved his tune “What Kind of Love Is This?” Joey Dee and the Starliters had cut his song in 1962 for the Columbia picture Two Tickets to Paris.     

I eventually witnessed Bob Marley & the Wailers eight times during 1975-1979. First sighting was July 13, 1975 at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood. I  Interviewed the Wailers in 1976 for Melody Maker. Comical memories of a ganja smoke-filled room at Island Records’ Tudor House office on Sunset Blvd. where I forgot to turn my cassette machine on to record our conversation.  

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were at the Wailers’ May 16, 1976 Roxy show. While waiting for their car to arrive in the parking lot of the adjacent Rainbow Bar & Grill, I thanked John for introducing me to reggae and blue beat music he touted in music weeklies and radio interviews.   

On July 22, 1978 I went to see the Wailers at The Starlight Bowl Ampitheatre in Burbank. A few reporters were given tickets and all access backstage passes. At the time press coverage in the US was important for the Wailers and Marley’s reggae mission. 

I watched the concert from the wings standing the whole evening with Mick Jagger, holding daughter Jade in his arms. Mick shared some ganja to our circle that included Peter Tosh, who was the opening act the next day for the Rolling Stones appearance at Anaheim Stadium.

Before the awe-inspiring evening concluded, a sweaty Bob Marley ran to our area of the venue, brushing up against me on his way to talk to Peter, who then joined him for a surprise appearance during “Get Up, Stand Up.” 

Tosh later told Roger Steffens, ‘Mi slap Bob’s hand and him say, ‘Bwoi, de Pope feel dat one.’ And three days later the Pope died.”              

“I wasn't in on the first wave of Island/Wailers swag in 1973 to promote Catch a Fire nor invited to that famously luminous Wailers' gig in smallish Hollywood club The Roxy in 1976,” emailed graphic artist/photographer and writer Heather Harris in July 2021. 

 “I was just a stringer, a photojournalist for the two entertainment sections of the UCLA Daily Bruin, circulation 40,000, rarely recipient of the top items. 

“All of us in what eventually became known as the UCLA Mafia started our respective creative careers while still in university, partly because the ambitious entertainment sections of the UCLA Bruin Icon and Index (of which I became editor my last two years at UCLA) put one in direct contact with all the record companies and movie studios of the era, who were more than happy to welcome loquacious students to freebie gigs and film previews to expound happily and wordily about their product. They even provided us with travel junkets! 

“An Icon or Index review, good or bad, was after all a free advertisement to 40,000 young consumers. This made all parties, students, musicians, artists and company publicists alike very happy indeed in this all win/win scenario.

“So no, my introduction to the Wailers/Bob Marley and the Wailers was entirely more organic I just immediately loved all the reggae that I encountered back in the day, and read up on what little info was out there.” 

 “And yes, said initiation predated Clapton's 1974 ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ cover. 1968's ska-ish ‘Israelites’ by Desmond Dekker's had intrigued us all mightily, and in 1970, the Move's "Beautiful Daughter" on the LP Shazam was introduced with the following spoken prologue--

“Interviewer:”    

“Q: Where are you from?” 

“A: “Subject.”    

“A: Stepney.” 

“Q: Stepney. Nice, um, what are your favorite British pop artists?” 

“A: Um, well I don't have one anyway.” 

“Q: Do you like reggae?”

“A: It's my music."

“And we all understood!” 

 “And, like, who doesn't love reggae? As with sambas and the waltz, this music has hugely likeable, instantly recognizable beat patterns unlike anything else,” Harris underscored. 

 “So I did however, insist, INSIST that the very next Wailers gig up the ladder to bigger venues, in this case the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, be mine to photograph and review, which I did.

“In 1976, by the time Island Records had come to rest as its own corporate entity it still needed an outside publishing arm, and praise be, I worked as assistant art director for that publishing arm, Almo Publications of A&M Records.  

“We utilized all our rock and pop culture knowledge to graphically put across songbooks which we knew that students would adore, but might initially confound their teachers and band leaders ordering the sheet music. 

“My own contribution was to implement, besides nifty photos and graphics, appropriate copy like a small book to explain the music, its context, history and importance to culture in general for the teachers/band leaders, and to stoke the glee of student recipients lucky enough to land this music to play instead their five thousandth version of Souza or bad show tunes from two demographics ago. (Constant fan mail confirmed this.) A tablature songbook of Rastaman Vibration was scheduled. Once again I insisted, INSISTED I be in charge of this project.

 “My acquaintance Jeff Walker, head of Island Records Public Relations was to be my liaison to the book, and his wife Kim Gottleib who had traveled to Jamaica with her husband Jeff Walker to hang with Bob Marley and all the Wailers would provide unique to the world insider looks at the musicians in their home environment. 

“Jeff implied it had been unbelievably difficult to keep up with the ganja ingestion of the band but gave it his all in the name of solidarity. He admitted coming home rather sick. He confided that despite the quality of the music, Island was having a tough time selling reggae to what they had thought would be its natural audience, young African Americans.  

“But no, in the 1970s that audience vastly preferred the shining success and glitz of a Diana Ross or Lionel Richie, not hardscrabble sorrows from Trenchtown. He pleaded that if there was any way to make this music appeal to the next audience thought to be its heir, college kids, to please, please do so. And I did.

“In my research I became the first to make the following connection, bear with me. Kurt Vonnegut was mid-1970s collegiate kids' favorite author by a longshot, and Cat's Cradle beat even Catch 22 as their favorite work. 

“The book's Caribbean religious leader is named Bokonon. The less than well-known full name of the Lion of Judah, the Emperor Haile Selassie is Ras Tafari Makonnen, pronounced like Bokonon. Rasta, naming itself thusly after the Emperor is central to Marley's music and thus to much of Reggae's lyrics. Welcome to the joys of reggae music on beyond cannabis, college kids and coeds. 

“The rest of the book filled in the blanks about the band and the music, since few writers beyond Roger Steffens and Ian Fleming even bothered to write about Jamaican culture before 1976.

“Since 1976 the entire world has caught up with reggae's premiere superstar Marley, who wrote of love, peace, philosophy, hard times, religion and sex, often all in the same song! The documentaries have made it abundantly clear that Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer pretty much came from nowhere to dominate prevail as their music finest representatives, even though it took a while for worldwide dominance.

 “With his wonderful music and stirring performances of it, Bob Marley made ours a better world, even with his shortened lifespan, and that's the most important thing any artist can do, or any person, for that matter. 

“I'm off to listen to Sirius XM's all Marley-related channel Tuff Gong.” 

During 1998 I interviewed teacher, philosopher, and spirit guide, Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now. 

In our dialogue I asked Ram Dass about Bob Marley. 

“I’d go to places like The Beacon Theater to hear Bob Marley and the Wailers; those kinds of things. Reggae – I loved that stuff. Reggae, Bob Marley blew my mind.”     

“It was his thing, his message; the quality of his being. His quality of being touched me deeply. I was touched very deeply. I felt that the deeper places I would get to in my own inner work, there would be people like who were resonant like that. Those were people who were resonant in that place in myself.    

 “You meet somebody who knows your deeper truth. You’re connecting sort of behind the kind of form and façade, and even though it’s through the forms, you can feel you are meeting another mensch, another spiritual being.

 “Marley blew my mind. Reggae music fascinated me, and also because of Jamaica and all the grass, all of that. The records were always around because everyone else around me had lots of records but…It really wasn’t the lyrics. It was not the lyrics. Most of my friends know all of the lyrics inside out, and I don’t. I was drawn to the music. I came from classical and jazz.”

Bob Marley, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, is notable not only as the man who put reggae on the global map, but, as a statesman in his native Jamaica, he famously brought together the country's warring factions. Today, Bob Marley remains one of the 20th century's most important and influential entertainment icons. Marley's lifestyle and music continue to inspire new generations as his legacy lives on through his music. 

In the digital era, he has the second-highest social media following of any posthumous celebrity, with the official Bob Marley Facebook page drawing more than 70 million fans, ranking it among the Top 20 of all Facebook pages and Top 10 among celebrity pages. 

Marley's music catalog has sold millions of albums worldwide. His iconic collection LEGEND holds the distinction of being the longest-charting album in the history of Billboard magazine's Catalog Albums chart and remains the world's best-selling reggae album. 

 Marley's accolades include inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1994) and ASCAP Songwriters Hall of Fame (2010), a GRAMMY® Lifetime Achievement Award (2001), multiple entries in the GRAMMY® Hall Of Fame, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2001). 

(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. For October 2021 the duo has written a multi-narrative volume Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for the publisher.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s book, Docs That Rock, Music That Matters, featuring interviews with D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Albert Maysles, Murray Lerner, Morgan Neville, Curtis Hanson, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Andrew Loog Oldham, Eddie Kramer, Dick Clark, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Christopher M. Allport, Travis Pike, Allan Arkush, and David Leaf, among others.

Kubernik’s writings are in the anthologies The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats and Drinking With Bukowski.

Harvey wrote the liner note booklets to the CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special and the Ramones’ End of the Century. 

Kubernik penned the liner notes to the November 2021 National Record Store Day Drops Lou Adler-produced release, A Combination of the Two, by Big Brother & the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin culled from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. Harvey is currently writing a female-themed music manuscript Sisters In Song. During 2020 Harvey Kubernik served as a Consultant on the 2-part documentary television series Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time directed by Alison Ellwood that premiered on EPIX television channel).