By 1970 the Wailers had been through seven years of famine at least in terms of finacial reward for the hundred-plus songs which they had released for Coxson Dodd and on their own label, Wail 'N Soul 'M in their two and a half years with Dodd's Studio One Label, beginning in late 1963, they were never paid more than three pounds a week each, despite the fact that they had a string of major hits in Jamaica.

And with the advent of their own business, they never discovered a way to get financially ahead, so that they could start reaping the benifits of their momentous musical labors. Following a period in which they retired to the verdant northern hills of Nine Miles, Bobs remote birthplace, the Wailers beleived that their fourtunes were about to change met they met with Leslie Kong, the Chinese - Jamaican producer/owner of Beverley's Records.

It was the slight and effeminate Kong who had recorded Marley's first solo records ('Judge Not/Do You Still Love Me", and "One Cup Of Coffee") two years before the Wailers began their career. Now, Kong had become a millionaire through the phenomenal and unprecedented international success with such songs as Little Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop", and the rootically mysterious top five U.S. hit by Desmond Dekker and the Aces called Israelites.

The Wailers and Kong hatched a plan. To this point, all reggae albums had been merely collections of singles. What the Wailers wanted to do was make the first real conceptual reggae album. At a time where the long playing record was coming into its own, bereft of singles (largely throught the influence of the Beetles), the Wailers wanted to attempt a thematicaly structured collection of songs geared to the idea of giving themselves a pep talk: We're back in the business, we're not afraid, and we are moving foward towards new heights, and the past be damned. The result was a spectacular acheivement that has been shrouded in controversy ever since, one whose creation has been led to myth-making and a propthetic vision. Of the twelve tracks that they recorded, ten were released. The others, "Sophisticated Psychedelication" and "Baby Baby Come Home" have remained somewhere in the vaults ever since. The album was finished in record time: Peter Tosh recalls cutting the entire work in just three hours, but Bunny maintains the process took a week. Regardless, by today's years-long standards for certain albums to reach the marketplace, their meticulous accomplishment is nothing short of stiupendous. The album was recorded in Dynamic Sounds studio on a four track with Kong himself at the production helm, alongside the Wailers' fovorite engineer, the onmipresent Carlton Lee. The title itself proved to be highly problematic. Bunny sensed that Kong would call this project The Best Of The Wailers, because they had told Kong that this was the only project that they were going to do with him, a way of making more money to finance their own works. Bunny warned Kong not to use that title, because one never knows the best of ones work till the end of his life. And the Wailers felt they had a long, long careers ahead of them. So, resoned Bunny, if this is our best to you, it must mean you are near the end of your life. Failing to heed Bunny's caveat, Kong went ahead with the album's release under the name, and a week late dropped dead in his home. From that day foward the words of Bunny Wailer carried a new kinf of weight in the small world of the Kingston studios.

The album was aborted temporarily, finally being released in the U.K. after a numer of their succeeding works with Lee Perry had been issued there. Today, it remains one of the most often bootlegged works in modern music, issued under dozens of different titles and cover art in the past 25 years, a testiment to the far-sightedness of Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, who knew that they were creating a masterpiece for the ages, something that would outlive them to bring hope to coming generations of sufferers hungry for solace and redemption.

By Bruno Blum & Jeremy Collingwood

Explore Rock to the Rock and the Selassie is the Chapel portions of this boxset

Learn more about Bob, Bunny, Peter, Rita