Originally released in February 1991, this album combines material from several different sources to trace the development of
Bob Marley & the Wailers between October 1973 and September 1975. The bulk of the disc comes from a 1973 radio concert performed before a handful of listeners at the Record Plant recording studio in San Francisco and broadcast by KSAN-FM. The original album contained seven songs from this performance, while the 2002 reissue adds three more to complete the show. The songs had been featured on the band's albums
Catch a Fire and
Burnin'. The outfit who played them was technically still
the Wailers, since
Peter Tosh was still with them (and sang lead on his own compositions, "You Can't Blame the Youth" and "Stop That Train"), although
Bunny Livingston had declined to tour and been replaced by
Joe Higgs. By 1974, when the group assembled to record their next album,
Natty Dread,
Tosh and
Livingston had quit, and the band was reorganized as
Bob Marley & the Wailers. From those sessions come alternate performances of "Talkin' Blues" and "Bend Down Low," as well as an outtake, "Am-a-Do." In July 1975, the band played two shows at the Lyceum in London that would break them in the U.K., when recordings from the performances were issued as the album
Live!. Here, a previously unreleased version of "I Shot the Sheriff" from the first concert is featured. (Maybe the reason it wasn't used on
Live! was the irritating announcer who proclaims, "a trenchtown experience.") Finally, the musical tracks are interspersed with excerpts from an interview with
Marley conducted in September 1975. While these spoken fragments provide a flavor of
Marley's conversation, his heavy patois is very difficult for non-Jamaicans to understand. Still, these are valuable odds and ends for the
Bob Marley fan. ~ William Ruhlmann